Welcome to my new lesson based on the style Diamond Head, an English heavy metal band formed in 1976 which is considered, among with Iron Maiden and Venom, one of the leading members of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal. They are also considered a big influence for bands like Metallica and Megadeth.

Music Style:
Diamond Head’s music is heavy metal that combines groovy sections, that where later called Thrash Metal with faster parts which are usually described as Speed Metal. When hearing their music, you will notice how much they influenced Metallica’s first albums. In this lesson, I tried to recreate their way of composing riffs but also a bit of Brian Tatler (guitarist) solo style. In the first half, you’ll hear a powerful riffing tune formed by a very Sabbath’s style intro, a groovy verse riff and a chorus over the 5th grade of the tonality.

Tonality, Chord Progression & Scales:
Their songs are pure metal. I can see that they were influenced by the first bands that played hard rock and metal, like Black Sabbath and Judas and used minor keys, mostly Aeolian and Phrygian, as well as blues scale. The riffs and chord progressions were built around these stuff combined with some chromatic passages that later were used a lot by Thrash Metal bands. If you want to go further with this, I recommend you to check my Thrash Metal Series.

Techniques:
This lesson combines rhythm with soloing so you’ll find many techniques that are suitable for late beginners and intermediate players. We will use palm muting, only down strokes, alternate picking, bending, vibrato and legato.

Sound:
I used LePoin plugins to create the guitar tone. These are free amp emulators that are extremely recommended. The head used for this guitar tone is Poulin HyBrit which is a Marshall amp emulation. For the solo I switched to Lextac, a Bogner emulations and also added a tube screamer emulation. Check out the settings: